Tomorrow’s agenda for BloggerCon calls for a discussion of blog and journalism. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading what other people had to say, synthesizing it in my own head and trying to figure out what it all meant. From there, I came to a couple of conclusions: Blogs are not journalism Journalism happens on blogs Blogs are the single biggest threat to the online publishing industry and the print publishing industry. Blogs are the single largest opportunity to the online publishing industry and could represent a big opportunity for the print industry. I know it sounds like 2 sets of contradictory statements but I’m really not hedging my bets here. What is happening is that blogs are representing such a radical shift in online publishing that what the response is from journalists and other content publishers will either increase or decrease the impact of the blogging phenomenon. What is happening is not so much a revolution as a continuing evolution of the trends started with the rise of the commercial Internet. Looking back, looking forward Let’s first take a step back in order to better understand the blogging phenomenon. They year is 1994. At that point, the…

News.com reports that the Dean campaign acknowledge it had spammed people on the Internet. Infrequent readers can find my stories on the subject here, here, here and there. What I find most interesting is that the news has been making the rounds in the blogosphere for a couple of weeks by now. My first entry is dated August 5th and the spamvertized article is about a week old. Once more, it seems that blogs are trumping regular news organizations when it comes to bringing breaking news to the public. Also of interest is the story itself. The Dean campaign is quoted saying On Tuesday, August 12th, Dean for America received notification from a supporter that spam was being sent. We terminated our relationship with both vendors immediately. What I find most interesting here is that I received the piece of spam on the 5th of August, emailed it to the Dean’s blog then (figuring I would get a response quickly). With no response on the initial email, I emailed them a link to my blog entry asking for comment and am still waiting for an answer. The article continues with The Dean campaign’s bulk e-mail, which was sent last week,…